1-027 - Who Takes Rejection to Heart and to Mind? Multilevel Influences on Psychophysiological Responses to Exclusion in Middle Childhood

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

From the family, to the schoolyard, to the workplace, interactions often involve threats of social exclusion. Responses to exclusion vary as a function of interaction partners, dispositional factors of the excluded party, as well as contextual aspects of the exclusion situation (Smart Richman, 2013). The richness and complexity of these factors leave much to be understood in terms of psychophysiological mechanisms underlying responses to social exclusion. This symposium focuses on social exclusion in middle childhood, with talks considering cardiac, electrocortical and genetic factors, internalizing and externalizing phenotypes with exclusion by unfamiliar peers and kin within the Cyberball paradigm.

Paper 1 reports on patterns of event-related cardiac slowing, offering new physiological evidence of more pronounced negative expectations regarding peer exclusion and reunion among anxious/depressed children with peer problems compared to controls. Paper 2 provides the first evidence in children that effects of social exclusion on perceived social needs may be modified by MAOA genotype, indicating a possible mechanism for MAOA gene by environment interactions.

Using a novel mother-child Cyberball, Paper 3 shows that both children and mothers show greater P2 and slow-wave responses to rejection by one another versus strangers, indicating greater salience and distress as well as approach tendencies in response to kin rejection compared to rejection by strangers. Paper 4 reports on differences in EEG theta power between parents and children to rejection by one another (reflecting different roles in the attachment relationship) and, for the first time, demonstrates that maternal responses to child rejection depend on attachment anxiety.

Sub Unit

• Biology and Neuroscience

Chair

• Lars O. White, University of Leipzig

Individual Presentations

• Whose Heart Brakes When? Effects of Anxiety, Depression and Peer Problems on Children’s Cardiac Slowing Upon Peer Exclusion - Presenting Author: Lars O. White, University of Leipzig; Boris Bornemann, Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences; Yvonne Otto, University of Leipzig, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Psychosomatics; Kai von Klitzing, University of Leipzig; Annette M Klein, University of Leipzig

• Moderation by MAOA-LPR status of responses of 7 year olds to social exclusion in the cyberball procedure - Presenting Author: Jonathan Hill, University of Reading; Andrew Pickles, Kings College London; Stuart Kehl, University of Liverpool; Helen Sharp, University of Liverpool

• Maternal Rejection and Child Anxiety in Mother Child Cyberball - Presenting Author: Michael J. Crowley, Yale Child Study Center

• Differential Responses to Ostracism in Mother-Child Dyads: Unpacking Relational Dynamics using an EEG Theta Analysis - Presenting Author: Jessica Borelli, Pomona College